Tennis: What’s With All the Yanks?

U.S. player Sam Querrey celebrates his second-round Wimbledon victory over Milos Raonic Friday.

A funny thing happened to the rest of American tennis players at Wimbledon after five-time champion Venus Williams and top-ranked male John Isner crashed out on the first day of the tournament: They started winning matches. Some of them haven’t stopped, and head into Wimbledon’s first weekend with a real opportunity to go far in the tournament.

Among the women, Venus’s sister Serena Williams hasn’t dropped a set and has a relatively clear path to a quarterfinal showdown with defending champion Petra Kvitova. Kvitova first will have to beat American Varvara Lepchenko, who will be an Olympic teammate of the Williams sisters on these courts later this summer. Christina McHale and Sloane Stephens advanced to the third round for the first time in their careers, though they were ousted Friday by, respectively, a pair of German women who are each among the top-15 seeds.

Still, Stephens, McHale and Lepchenko each have managed the feat of advancing to the third round of both the French Open and Wimbledon, making them the first such American trio since 2005 and demonstrating an uncommon comfort on both clay and grass.

There are even more American men playing on. All four who are scheduled to play third-round matches have come back from injuries this season. Mardy Fish is playing his first tournament since April, and is recovering from surgery to address an irregular heartbeat. Andy Roddick has been struggling this year with hamstring and ankle problems and until last week hadn’t won a match in three months. Sam Querrey is coming back from right elbow surgery last year. And Brian Baker has just a month of tour-level matches since beginning his comeback from six years away from professional tennis for a string of ailments and surgeries.

Fish and Roddick are both seeded here, and each has been the top-ranked American male at some point within the last 18 months, but their performances at this tournament haven’t been particularly convincing. Each has beaten both a British wild card and a journeyman with no tour-level wins on grass heading into this tournament. Fish needed five sets to put away wild card James Ward in the second round. Roddick saw 74% of his serves come back into play against wild card Jamie Baker in the first round, well above the first-round average of 67%. Each will have to play better in the next round. Fish gets rising Belgian star David Goffin, while Roddick faces sixth seed David Ferrer. Roddick and Ferrer each won grass-court tournaments last week.

Querrey scored the biggest win of any American so far, ousting Milos Raonic, the 21st seed and a popular pick to ride his rocket serve far at this tournament. Afterward Querrey called it “definitely my biggest win in a long time.” Querrey appears headed back toward the top 20, which he first cracked two years ago. But he might not make any more progress at this tournament: He next faces Marin Cilic, who won their last meeting two weeks ago in the semifinals at Queen’s Club.

The American playing the best tennis at the moment, though, may be Baker. He played his way into the tournament through qualifying, and has won his last nine sets, six of them without losing more than two games in each. Counting qualifying matches, he’s 13-3 since the start of the Nice tournament, including wins over six seven players ranked in the top 100. And while all four remaining Americans could benefit from the hole Lukas Rosol created in their half of the draw by upsetting Rafael Nadal on Thursday, Baker is the American most likely to reap rewards: He was slated to play Nadal in the fourth round. Suddenly a quarterfinal berth looks possible, even probable, for the man whose comeback started, unranked, at a futures event less than a year ago.

The doubles draws also opened up nicely for Americans on Friday. Bob and Mike Bryan, the 2011 champions, won’t have to beat the top-seeded pair of Max Mirnyi and Daniel Nestor, who have dominated them in two finals this month. Mirnyi and Nestor were upset on Friday by Daniele Bracciali and Julian Knowle. And on the women’s side, top-ranked Liezel Huber and Lisa Raymond – who survived a tough three-set match Friday – won’t have to play Kveta Peschke and Katarina Srebotnik, the defending champions who also were knocked out Friday.

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